Our world is dumber than the Onion thinks

Your column on the success of the Onion and the fake news paradigm (Click here to see column) brought back a few memories.

My son Jake, deciding his Chinese really needed work, quit his job with the Council on Foreign Relations and went to China to study the language (we had lived there for five years when I was the AP Beijing photo editor). Like any good American eager for news of home he regularly called up the Onion web page.

A few hours later he picked up the Beijing Evening News and saw the same fake photo and (somewhat rewritten, and translated to Chinese) story on solons threatening to move unless they upgraded the capitol.

He (re)translated same and sent a photocopy to the Onion, apparently the first they had heard of it; his reward was an Onion T-shirt.

He didn’t mention it to the major news bureaus in Beijing; it came to their attention a bit later and their calls began to hector the Evening News editors.

The Beijing Evening News is a tabloid size paper, considerably more
interesting (crime news, etc.) than the staid People’s Daily, the party
mouthpiece (actually, all papers in China are Party mouthpieces; that’s the way it works there).